[bembol]

Are there any advantages of getting an external hard drive?

I'm thinking of buying one for my Mini because I have some MP3's and Pics on my old Dell 8100 that needs to be transferred.

[Randman]

Extra space. Faster hard drive (for some). Being able to have a bootable backup.

[graffix]

On the Mac mini you can increase its performance by booting from a faster external drive. The internal drive is pretty slow (4200rpm?).

[audiophilegeek]

If you do get an external though to boot from make sure that it's firewire (400 or 800) and that it's externally powered. I have two different externals, one is 120 gb and it's a 5.25 normal sized HD that's firewire and USB. My other is a small 2.5 inch 80 gig laptop drive that's in an ipod sized enclosure that I built myself. While the small drive can be powered with an AC adapter, it's not needed as the drive fires up with just the firewire cable. Honestly, for portability and for use as a drive to use as a back up system or as a primary boot drive the smaller of the two is my preference. You can pick up an enclosure for a laptop drive for about 30 bucks, just make sure it's firewire or firewire/usb combined. Hope that helps.

[Dale Sorel]

Lacie makes some nice hard-drives, and their prices are reasonable.

[Cadaver]

Originally Posted by audiophilegeek

If you do get an external though to boot from make sure that it's firewire (400 or 800) and that it's externally powered. I have two different externals, one is 120 gb and it's a 5.25 normal sized HD that's firewire and USB.

5.25"?? Wow, that's a big hard drive (since desktop units are actually 3.5")

[budster101]

Get a 60gb hard drive. I hear they make some that play music and store your photos.
I think they call it, uhm... a, no wait,

A 60GB iPod photo.
Holds 15,000 songs. Met a guy who had two of them filled.
Also holds Eleventy Billion Photos. Ok, not quite.

[bembol]

My little brother made a comment...he thinks I'm messed up because I'm only thinking of buying all this because of it's a new "toy."

He said, if you didn't back up your Dell 8100 (Windows) after owning for 5+ years, why do you need to back up your Mac?

[SSharon]

I use my firewire drives for backup. If for whatever reason (fire?) I need to I can grab the drive and run and know I have all my data.

Sometimes I also use the cases to help PC friends with there messed up drives and sometimes I use them to transfer large files to other computers.

[CanadaRAM]

>Are there any advantages of getting an external hard drive?

Coffee warmer...

[tomrock]

I use one to backup and keep stuff I don't need all the time. The advantage to me is that it doesn't have to be on all the time. I just turn it on, backup and turn it off. Seems like it ought to last longer that way.